Small Business Susan

Steps to take (assuming you haven’t upgraded to Anniversary edition yet)

Step one on your Essentials R2 machine:  Ensure https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3172614is installed.  It’s the July non security update rollup.

On your clients, uninstall the OLD connector (it will be listed as a windows update) and then go to http://servername/connect and manually reinstall/reconnect your workstations to the server.  This will install the NEW connector as a program not as an update.

Install the anniversary update.  You may (you will) find that the newly revised connector appears to be gone.  It really isn’t it’s just an issue with the notification area cache.  Thanks to Mike (The Office Maven) we have a fix:

EssentialsTrayApp.exe doesn’t work after KB3172614:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/2c21527e-4f91-4513-98d3-6db8d3f83a9b/essentialstrayappexe-doesnt-work-after-kb3172614?forum=winserveressentials

Hi All,

Apparently the “Notification Area Icons” cache becomes (somewhat???) corrupted when installing the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (1607), and this in turn is causing EssentialsTrayApp.exe to error out when it attempts to reset the Essentials notification area icon (as is indicated by the errors that are shown in the EssentialsTrayApp.<SID>.log file).

In order to correct the issue, you simply need to reset the Notification Area Icons cache for each user who is missing the Essentials notification area icon on their Windows 10 client computer. I have tested this on three separate Windows 10 client computers (Pro and Home), and it has corrected the problem on all of them.

To reset the Notification Area Icon cache, simply download the “Reset_Notification_Area_Icons_Cache.bat” file from the following web page (props go out to Shawn Brink and the Windows Ten Fourms for their excellent tutorial!):

How to Reset Notification Area Icons in Windows 10

After the client computer has restarted, you will find the Essentials notification area icon has returned to the notification area of your Windows 10 client computer.

I hope this helps everyone out that is currently experiencing the problem on their Windows 10 client computers.

— MIKE (The Office Maven)

Now here’s step two:

Susan note:  I realize that all of this is extremely confusing and requires way too many manual steps.  I too wish that Microsoft could release an update that didn’t require a manual uninstall and reinstall.  I find this discouraging (to say the least).